Berenice Abbott knew
Eugene Atget for only a few months before he died, but from the moment she
saw his photographs of Parisstreets, people, buildings and storefrontsshe
knew she had found something special. She bought Atgets entire collection,
more than 1,000 glass negatives and 7,000 prints, and brought them to the
United States to promote them to museums, galleries, and art and photography
magazines.

When Berenice Abbott arrived in New York in 1929 with Atgets photos,
she was planning on a three-week visit. She had been living in Europe
for eight years, where she had an established and successful photography
business. But what she saw in New York took her breath away. Unbelievable
wealth and heart-breaking poverty; cars, trains and trolleys among horse-drawn
milk carts; straight-sided skyscrapers soaring up around old ramshackle
buildings; rectangles everywhere; an intense machine of a city. Abbott
never returned to Paris. Instead she began photographing New York just
as Atget had photographed Paris. She wanted to make a photographic record
of this city of contrasts. But Abbott would photograph New York in her
own way, imposing her love of facts and her belief that photography, a
twentieth-century invention, was the only medium worthy of capturing twentieth-century
New York. She set up a studio in Manhattan and spent the next ten years
photographing New York.